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In matlab script editor, we can use double percent symbol to define a region. for example in the following matlab script, two region are defined:

%% region 1
a=1;
b=2;
%% region 2
c=7;
d=5;

The advantage of defining region is that you can just execute one region where the cursor locates rather than the whole script by press ctrl+enter.

if the cursor is at c=7; line, after pressing ctrl+enter, c=7 and d=5 will be executed while a=1 and b=2 will not be executed.

however, I have searched a lot from web to find something equivalent in ESS, there is no results.

There is a command 'eval region' in ESS, but I don't know how to define such a region.

Thanks in advance!

Chenming Zhang
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2 Answers2

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The region is emacs speak for the part of the text that you would (essentially) consider to be "highlighted" in a "normal"/GUI text editor.

You can read more about it in The Mark and the Region in the emacs manual.

As far as I know, there is no equivalent to the matlab behavior you are describing. The few times I have used matlab, though, I do recall finding it handy when poking at a problem using ad hoc scripts.

Steve Lianoglou
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As Steve said select a region, then all the standard ESS evaluation commands will act on a region (C-c C-c,C-RET,C-M-x).

But, what you describe sounds very interesting. Would you mind giving the full description of the workflow and markup, and post it to ess-help mailing list for a more thorough discussion? I would be interested in implementing such a feature. Thanks.

VitoshKa
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  • To prime the pump, [this](http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/run-sections-of-programs.html) is the documentation page for the feature being discussed here. You can see a relatively small script there in the "Example of Evaluating Code Sections" section that shows the behavior. It's a cute trick, but some might consider it a poorman's version of Rmarkdown ;-) – Steve Lianoglou Jun 11 '13 at 18:14
  • @SteveLianoglou Thanks. Matlab's implementation deeply integrates with the parser and recognize nesting levels. In emacs top level regions are easily implementable. I have added this to our todo. – VitoshKa Jun 15 '13 at 12:49